TAMPA — A courtroom full of people who paid off Angel Yulee Adams' debts and found a rent-free, six-bedroom home for her and a dozen of her children waited Monday morning for a sign of gratitude, a clue of cooperation. They waited for a thank you.

They didn't get it. Angel Adams, 37, said she was glad to have the home. But she wanted them all out of her life.

"I've been railroaded since day one," she said.

The state says day one was 21 months and 28 hearings ago, when Adams first landed in the courtroom of Hillsborough Circuit Judge Tracy Sheehan. Ever since then, Sheehan said, the state has tried to keep Adams and her children together.

But Adams lost her home after failing to pay rent to the Tampa Housing Authority, then recently was evicted from a two-bedroom rental apartment. All her things were dumped on the curb. She and 12 children wound up in a small motel room on E Busch Boulevard.

Her situation looked a lot better on Monday, thanks to the combined efforts of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, the state Department of Children and Families, Hillsborough Kids Inc., the Children's Home Society and A Kid's Place — which last week gave her a temporary cottage at its shelter near Brandon.

Officials from most of those agencies packed the judge's courtroom Monday to give a status report. Nick Cox, DCF's regional director, spoke for them.

"Everyone has bent over backward," he said. "The mother has been less than gracious."

Hillsborough Kids volunteered to help cover the more than $6,000 she owes to the Tampa Housing Authority. The Children's Home Society paid the first month's rent for the six-bedroom house and found furnishings. Her rent, adjusted for income and the size of her family, will be virtually nothing, Cox said. He couldn't estimate how much the state has spent on her in the past two years.

The 12 children have been out of school for more than a week, but Cox said Adams appears to be a loving mother. She still could lose her children, he said, if she doesn't work with caseworkers and show the state she is adequately caring for them.

"From a legal standpoint, she's backing us into a corner," Cox said. He asked the judge to tell Adams to "stop complaining and start cooperating."

Judge Sheehan gave her a lecture.

Adams would not have sat through 28 hearings if her kids had been fed, got their medicines and were living in a good home, the judge said. "We know you want us out of your life," she told Adams. "We will be thrilled to close this case when you have all these things."

Adams sat at a table just below the judge's bench, looking away from Sheehan.

"A lot of people have gone way extra miles for you," Sheehan said. "Do you understand that?"

Adams replied quietly, "No comment, your honor."

"Hear what I'm saying," the judge told her. "Reach out your hand to these people instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth and asking for more, more, more."

After the hearing, Adams said she's a proud Florida native, a descendent of David Levy Yulee, a former U.S. senator and plantation owner who built the Yulee Railroad line in North Florida in the mid 1800s and was later imprisoned for aiding the Confederacy. She once worked in a linen factory. She has three other older children, besides the 12 who live with her.

She said her misfortunes began when she scuffled with a sheriff's deputy two years ago. It happened when her 9-year-old son was suspended for bringing a knife to school. She was two months pregnant. After her arrest, she said her troubles snowballed.

The Hillsborough Sheriff's Office removed her children after finding neglect in the home. She got her kids back six months ago, but the father of 10 of them, Garry Brown, was sentenced to five years for a cocaine conviction. Without his help, she said, she fell into debt. Hillsborough Kids paid the rent for her last apartment.

Adams said she wasn't planning on more children, but "whatever God wants to happen is okay with me."

Outside the courtroom, across the hall, Cox said DCF believes in keeping families together. That's the agency's main mission.

"She is the ultimate test of our belief."

[Last modified: April 26, 2010 10:16 p.m.]

[Thanks to NightwingBMV1 for the upload, and reader-researcher "W" for the sendalong.]

Kathy read that, and immediately sent me the above video, in which she told me to look for the spot 1:40 in. A black man in Harlem talks about “the system,” and thank heavens the white comic, Nick DiPaolo, doesn’t let him get away with it.

CBS-KPIX reporter Kiet Do says that a rivalry between two rappers may be behind the mass shooting in Oakland, at 6:29 p.m. Monday evening, in which three hooded figures shot eight people. At press time, a 1-year-old boy, a man, and a woman are all in critical condition.

A rap group was performing by the “catering truck” shown in the video. (Not the white van, but what appears to be an old, yellow school bus.) Friends and locals were watching, and one or more observers was videotaping the performance. At least one private surveillance camera trained on the area, at State Market Liquors, caught the shooters, though not, apparently, their faces.

The three hooded shooters came around from the State Market Liquors side, and opened fire on the performers and their audience, who were clustered in the middle of the parking lot, hitting at least seven people. Some of the people at the performance fired back. None of the defensive shooters or other witnesses is cooperating with police.

Hiram Johnson was holding his 1-year-old, toddler son, also named Hiram. The father was shot in the hand, and the son in the head. The elder Johnson immediately drove his son to Children’s Hospital Oakland, where the father said the child is comatose but appears not to have suffered brain damage. Earlier today, the elder Johnson tweeted,

Right now lil cuz in coma but both sides of brain seems to be functioning right now pray pls.

All other victims were either driving themselves to local hospitals, or were being driven by friends or relatives, by the time the Oakland PD showed up.

The splice from the video made by a camera recording the performance, to the video from the State Market Liquors camera can be disorienting, as each faces in a different direction, and there are no markers common to both. However, at the beginning of Kiet Do’s WPIX report, note the Lay’s/Dorito truck parked approximately 20 yards from where the victims were shot. (Not to be confused with the white van in the video of the rap performance.) That truck looms large in the State Market Liquors video.

State Market Liquors’ co-owner Salah Abdullah said that he heard about 50 shots fired.

The trial should finally lay out the exact scenario of the crime. One account alleges that the two assailants went into what they thought was a sorority house when they encountered Eve Carson. Why it's as if the two just made a "random" mistake.

They are selling postcards of Hitler in the gift shop at the Guggenheim Museum. To be precise, they are selling photographic reproductions of a work entitled Him, a polyester portrayal of the Führer that is one of the works by Maurizio Cattelan in his retrospective at the museum. I can imagine being outraged or at least troubled by the postcards in the gift shop, except that by the time I saw them I had already been bombarded by this exhibition in which nearly all of Cattelan's oversized neo-Dadaist baubles have been hung from the ceiling of Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda. Cattelan's Hitler doll—like his Picasso doll, his bicycle, his dinosaur, and the rest of the 128 items in this stupefyingly sophomoric show—is engineered for offense, irony, comedy, or who knows what else. Those who are bothered by the Hitler postcards in the gift shop are naturally going to be dismissed as insufficiently hip.

[So far, so good. I'm taking a liking to this fellow. He has standards.]

The same goes for those who are disturbed by the sight of one of the world's greatest public spaces once again turned over to an art world charlatan as his personal playpen. My own feeling is that the postcards, however misbegotten, are speech we accept, although not necessarily embrace, in a society we prize for its openness. What is really disquieting is the event that has occasioned these postcards. "Maurizio Cattelan: All"—that's the title of the show—amounts to hate speech directed at the sponsoring institution.

I'm sorry to be a party pooper. From what I could see when I visited the other day, museumgoers were perfectly content as they meandered up and down the ramps at the Guggenheim, snapping pics of Cattelan's pixies on their iPhones. Of course, museumgoers also seemed happy—maybe more happy, I'm not sure—looking at the Impressionist and Post-impressionist paintings in a gallery off the rotunda. And everybody was definitely all smiles as they came out of the Guggenheim into a spectacularly lovely November afternoon. The truth is that Cattelan's presence at the Guggenheim has nothing to do with what the public may or may not want.

Cattelan is at the Guggenheim because the big money in the art business is behind him. The other day, one of his minor works, a miniature model of two elevator doors, sold for just over a million dollars at Christie's. (It comes in an edition of ten, one of which is hanging on Fifth Avenue and 89th Street.) And that was one of the more modest prices at Christie's contemporary sale on November 8, where a Robert Gober Prison Window went for $3.3 million and a 1961 Roy Lichtenstein for $43.2 million.

The collector Eli Broad was quoted, at the end of the auction, explaining that "People would rather have art than gold or paper." To which it seems to me the only response is that people who have millions of dollars to spend on a Cattelan, a Gober, or a Lichtenstein are not what used to be known as "the people." [Broad didn't say "the people"; he just said said, "people."] Never mind. What "the people" are more and more seeing when they go to museums is what Eli Broad and a few other collectors and dealers with very deep pockets think they should see. ['Twas ever so.] At that same Christie's auction, the gallerist ["Gallerist"? What the h-e-c-k is a gallerist? Someone who owns an art gallery?] Larry Gagosian bought an early Cy Twombly for $5.2 million. Twombly, who died in July, is nowadays regarded by some as one of the giants of modern art. His reputation is so high that over the summer the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London mounted an exhibition, "Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters," that paired him with the seventeenth-century French artist who redefined classicism for the modern world. Whatever one may think of Twombly—and I like some of his earlier work quite a bit—the Dulwich show was a rather astonishing example of reputation inflation. And who, pray tell, sponsored "Twombly and Poussin"? I can't say I was surprised, on opening the exhibition catalogue, to discover that the sponsor was none other than Larry Gagosian.

Money and culture have never been easily disentangled, nor would one want them to be, considering that culture is by no means cost efficient. But there are different forms of patronage and different kinds of entanglements. And culture is now in retreat before the brute force of money. Even the most easygoing commentators can see the writing on the wall, and some critics who might have been expected to be amused by the Cattelan retrospective have not enjoyed the show. Who knows? Maybe they're tired of partying in a funhouse where they will never be more than dinner guests. As for the people who buy and sell Maurizio Cattelan, my guess is they don't give a damn what critics—or for that matter museumgoers—say.

So where do we go from here? I have spent years asking myself that question, and if anything I'm farther from an answer than ever before. I would, however, recommend that anybody who wonders about these matters take a look at "Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art," a fascinating exhibition at MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art] accompanied by an important catalogue. In 1931 Diego Rivera was the second artist selected for a one man show at MoMA; Matisse had been the first. One of the moving forces in the founding of the museum, just two years old at the time, was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who took an interest in Rivera's work and lent financial support to the exhibition. She was much involved in getting Rivera, an avowed Leftist [he means, "an avowed Communist"], the commission for a vast mural at Rockefeller Center, a building project dedicated to the glories of capitalism. The mural was to be devoted to the theme of man at the crossroads. And the project was nearing completion when it was scrapped by the Rockefellers, who paid Rivera the rest of his fee, sent him packing, and destroyed the mural, unwilling to accept either Rivera's flattering portrait of Lenin or his unflattering portrait of John D. Rockefeller Jr. or both, it is not clear. [Oh, so Lenin good, Hitler bad; got it.] This ugly history is retold in a catalogue essay by Leah Dickerman, the MoMA curator who organized the exhibition and has emerged in recent years as one of our most lucid and persuasive students of early twentieth-century art. To the tangled relations between the Rockefellers and Rivera, Dickerman offers no simple explanation, but rather a complex dynamic, with modernism and capitalism and Leftism [Communism] sometimes at loggerheads, although not always. The portrait she gives of Rivera's time in New York is tantalizing.

Rivera created for the MoMA exhibition a group of portable frescoes meant to give a taste of the immense wall decorations he was painting in Mexico at the time. They make a striking temporary display in the museum today, where they have been set into the walls so that we feel their planar force. Some of the frescoes recapitulate passages from his Mexican work. Others, done after he arrived in New York, are direct responses to the city as it descended into the Depression, with the towers of the Art Deco city looming above a wharf where homeless people sleep in a dormitory. Rivera's work here is compelling and coarse, strong on journalistic rhetoric and weak on pictorial invention. The exhibition—and here I feel the same fine curatorial imagination that Dickerman brought to her collaboration with architecture and design curator Barry Bergdoll on MoMA's great 2009 Bauhaus show—enriches and complicates our understanding of the Museum of Modern Art's own history. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the museum's founding director, is too often nowadays regarded as a rigid formalist. Nothing could be farther from the truth. And in reminding us that among his first great projects was a show dedicated to the Mexican Leftist Diego Rivera, whom Barr had met in Moscow, Dickerman takes us one step closer to reclaiming the extraordinarily complex story of the Museum of Modern Art.

There was no aspect of modern experience that did not interest Barr. He was moved by the evangelical power of abstract art, and also believed that representational art of one kind or another had a future. (America's abstract avant-garde sometimes criticized Barr as hopelessly conservative.) One of the minor delights of this show are the pages of Rivera's 1928 Moscow Sketchbook, with view after view of parades awash in red flags and banners, the cumulative effect cinematic, fueled by Rivera's feeling for surging crowds and populist exhilaration [demagoguery]. During the period Rivera was in Moscow filling his sketchbook, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party, and by the time Rivera arrived in New York for the MoMA show he was a Trotskyite and thus aware of the Stalinist perils that no amount of brilliant red banners could disguise. Rivera's Moscow Sketchbook was owned by none other than Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who gave it to the Museum of Modern Art, a souvenir of the pageantry of Soviet Communism ["Pageantry"? Did he just speak of "the pageantry of Soviet Communism"?] deposited in an American museum by the matriarch of one of capitalism's defining dynasties. The ironies are almost incalculable. [What would he know about "ironies"?!] And we must not forget that Rivera was himself a fashionable figure in the early 1930s, at home in café society. [Among rich, decadent Communists.] As I said before, art and money can never be disentangled, nor would we want them to be. But there is money and there is money. And what Rockefeller money did for American art in the 1930s is a far cry from what the rich are doing to American art eighty years later.

* * *

I tried to post the following comment, but TNR only permits paid subscribers to post comments at its site.

The critic is disgusted with Hitler being presented both as a subject of art, and an opportunity for commercialization. So far, so good. But then he criticizes the Rockefellers for scrapping a Rockefeller Center mural by Diego Rivera idealizing Lenin.

Considered the greatest Mexican painter of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera had a profound effect on the international art world.

Should a man feel flattered or insulted to be "Considered the greatest Mexican painter of the twentieth century"? Similarly, was the PBS propagandist insulting "the international art world"?

Lenin, good; Hitler, bad? How does that work? Lenin murdered millions in his five years as dictator, and Stalin continued his work. Together, they murdered many millions more people than Hitler did. But they were "the good guys"? Or does Perl expect us to think that the mass-murdering Lenin was good, but the mass-murdering Stalin—he of "the Stalinist perils"—was bad? Perl speaks of "the Mexican Leftist Diego Rivera." That would be the Mexican Communist Diego Rivera.

I guess Jed Perl (and his spiritual brother, Diego Rivera), in my unfashionable way of speaking—is a "good communist," as opposed to those "bad communist" Stalinists.

But if CNN was guilty of politically correct coverage of the Nichols case, they were pikers, compared to alleged reporter Beth Warren, also of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who embodies what I call the banality of bias.

In an article in which Warren listed one example after another of Nichols' racism, she concluded that his crimes were not racially motivated. Right. Just like with Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad mass murderer.

Brian G. Nichols considered himself a "soldier on a mission" the day he terrorized a courthouse and a city with a gun, according to a law enforcement official who witnessed Nichols first statement to authorities.

The official said Nichols, who was being tried in a rape case when Friday's deadly shooting spree occurred, considered himself a wrongly accused man in a legal system unfair to African-Americans….

In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the official said Nichols described how he had been stewing in jail while awaiting retrial on charges that he held his ex-girlfriend hostage and sexually assaulted her. The first jury couldn't agree and the judge declared a mistrial.

Nichols said he was angry that many of the inmates around him were also black and he wondered how many were innocent.

[Based on what former Fulton County Assistant DA Denise A. Sorino told me in a telephone interview, one could more accurately conclude that Nichols had been surrounded by violent, persistent felony offenders, who typically had "over a page of priors." ]

"He called it systematic slavery," the law enforcement official said.

Nichols didn't feel he was mistreated by deputies at the jail or courthouse, the official said. But he also didn't care that the deputies he would soon hurt were black. His anger was focused more on the legal system than race. And the main target was Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, who was preparing to resume hearing Nichols' rape trial.

But Warren admits that Nichols said that "the attack [on Judge Barnes] wasn't personal. In fact, he told authorities he thought Barnes had been fair to him during court proceedings."

Warren hears 'race, race, race,' but concludes, 'not race.' Why, if Nichols felt that Judge Barnes had been fair to him, would he kill him anyway? Because the judge was a white authority figure. Why would he kill the white court reporter, but none of the blacks in the room with her? Because she was white. And she wasn't even an authority figure!

Chaz Thrailkill, 19, of Markham, Ill., has been charged in the fatal shooting of Steven R. Agee II, 22, of Park Ridge in south suburban Chicago. The two reportedly got into an altercation early Wednesday.

[N.S.: Apparently, these murders are scheduled parts of the entertainment: "And now, the part you'll all been waiting for. To enhance your pleasure, and as an offering to the party Gods, some unsuspecting partygoer will be slaughtered!"

Chaz Thrailkill, 19, of Markham, was arrested late Wednesday morning and charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and aggravated discharge of a firearm in the fatal shooting. He is being held on a $3 million bond, NBC Chicago reports.

Detectives say the party was attended by dozens of people, including many NIU students, according to the <I>Sun-Times</I>.

The student's father, Steven Agee Sr., told the Chicago Tribune Wednesday he had "just lost his baby boy. That's it." His son was majoring in sociology at NIU, had a job offer lined up in San Diego after his upcoming graduation and was planning to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with his parents.

"And now there will be no more holidays with him, not even this one coming now," Agee told the Tribune.

Though they originally instructed students to remain indoors, university later reported that "there is no imminent threat to the community" and that the shooting was "an isolated incident that occurred as the result of an argument that escalated between two people at a party."

And in 1968, an equal number of voters chose Katharine Hepburn as Best Actress for a glorified supporting role in the treacly Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, as chose Streisand for her bravura performance as Fanny Brice in the dramatic musical, Funny Girl.

And she ain’t what she used to be as a singer. At 69, she sounds like Lena Horne. [Not that there’s anything wrong with that.] But for about 30 years, she was God’s gift to music.

In 1955, a then-13-year-old Barbra Streisand made a demo tape of “You’ll Never Know,” one of the most popular and best songs of World War II, when she was a baby in Flatbush, Brooklyn. I’ve never heard another 13-year-old who could sing like that.

In the late 1980s, she dug up the old demo’s master and re-mastered it, with all of the bells-and-whistles invented since 1955. She made the well-preserved tape sound like a scratchy old record, and sang the same song, as a middle-aged women, lamenting the loss of her childhood innocence, and overlaid the one sound on the other. She laid the track for her 1992 album, Just for the Record.

In the video, she can be seen directing the assembled studio orchestra while singing.

I know—Barbra Streisand loving and lamenting her lost, younger self involves narcissism and self-caricature on steroids. If you think about it, it leads to endless levels of pornographic irony.

For the next four minutes, put aside your justified hostility towards Barbra Streisand the person, and enjoy one of the last great performances of Barbra Streisand, the greatest singer of her generation.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Suitland is in notorious and violent [N.S.: yet well-to-do, thanks to all those high-paying, AA gubmint jobs!] Prince George's County, Maryland: http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/01/pg-county-murders-2011-a-tale-of-one-county-split-in-two-44768.html

Nice Section 8 name of victim. Police say the shooting victim, 34-year-old Jhonte Coleman, of Suitland, Md., died of his injuries after being transported to the hospital.

I attended a Roman Catholic high school located just a few miles from Suitland. Thirty-five years ago the area was a lily white working class and middle class enclave. Crime of all sorts was non-existent.

WJLA reports one story of carjacking, armed robbery, and/or kidnapping after another, without any physical descriptions. However, they do let the reader know the race, “in a smart way,” as The Boss would say, of one: White carjacking suspect Stephanie Lynn Schwab. Has anyone ever heard of someone with a name like Stephanie Lynn Schwab who wasn’t white?

Besides, they have published security camera photographs of Schwab, and previously reported that the then unnamed suspect was a white female, even mentioning the color of her eyes.

Reading WJLA could lead someone to think that there a bunch of carjackers in the D.C. area, and the only known suspect is white. Yeah, someone from Mars!

And then there’s a racist commenter, “sadden,” who had the nerve to post the following remark:

1. Sadden Nov 27, 2011 - 12:24:15 PMFolks I worked for DOJ as a contractor and we got the stats on crime all the time. Everyone commits them. The whole country seems to be in a frenzy, sad but true. Even the politicans are not getting along and everyone is paying for it. We need a miracle right about now.

The first law of lying is plausibility. What, is this guy trying to get innocent whites killed? Though blacks lie just as badly when dealing with whites, they know very well what the deal is, and act accordingly.

And he actually expects people to both ignore the (massaged) Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers and their own eyes, and instead believe his transparent lies, as if he had access to secret information?

Fortunately, though he did get two votes, the other posters weren’t buying it, and told him so.

Eleven robberies and carjackings of cab drivers have taken place in the District this November. Police say the suspects work in groups of between two and four people, hailing cabs outside Metro stations.

On Saturday, November 19, a 59-year-old woman was approached by a young woman who said she had run out of gas. The woman gave her a ride at which point the young woman allegedly pulled out a knife and took the car.

Channeling a bit of his iconic, profane predecessor Coleman Young, Mayor Dave Bing lashed out today at the Detroit City Council over cost-cutting proposals to prop up the struggling city and called again for structural reforms to union contracts that he said are needed forestall a state-appointed emergency financial manager — or bankruptcy.

["Iconic"? That's like calling a near-fatal illness you once survived "iconic." "King" Coleman Young weas notorious, not iconic. George Washington was iconic.]

"If we can't get structural change, there is no way to avoid a bankruptcy or emergency financial manager," he said.

His words came during a meeting with local business journalists at his office in the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center on this afternoon — an unpaid furlough day for city employees.

Detroit expects to run out of cash by April. By the end of the fiscal year in June, the shortfall is estimated to be $45 million. The city has an accumulated deficit of about $180 million in its $1.2 billion general fund.

Clad in a Detroit Pistons sweatshirt and ball cap, Bing defended the proposal he unveiled last week to trim $102 million this fiscal year through a combination of a 0.9-percentage-point increase in taxes on C-corporations, pay cuts, union concessions on benefits and pensions, work rule changes, outsourced management of the bus system, cuts in vendor payments and 1,000 layoffs.

Those same cuts would save an additional $258 million in fiscal 2013, he said.

Bing revealed today that the Detroit Public Schools has agreed to pay the city $15 million to settle a delinquent $31 million utility bill but said that money doesn't mean the unions will have to get $15 million less.

If the city's 48 unions don't agree to renegotiate their deals and provide structural changes, the city will be taken over by an emergency financial manager or default in a Chapter 9 bankruptcy, he reiterated.

If the unions "don't come to the table and buy into the plan, it'll happen anyway," he said.

Bing doesn't think an emergency manager is the ideal solution.

"They can't come in here and run the city any better than we can," he said.

Gov. Rick Snyder's administration has been cool toward Bing's plans, and it's thought that the governor wants the mayor and City Council to jointly seek a state review of Detroit's finances — a move Bing said is "useless" because the city gives the state its 13-week cash flow projections every month.

Instead, Bing said Snyder will have to make a decision on installing an emergency financial manager, who will be able to toss out union contracts and make structural changes to benefits and pensions.

"The governor will have to make a move," Bing said.

Snyder's office said that the proposals are being reviewed and that efforts are being made to induce cooperation. No decision has been made whether the governor will install a financial manager without a request from the mayor and council.

"That's going to have to be evaluated and considered within the context of what happens in the next few days and weeks," said Sara Wurfel, Snyder's press secretary.

In the meantime, Bing is taking off his gloves and will return fire to those who criticize him — saying his days of acting like "nothing more than a gentleman" since taking office are over.

"All that bulls**t is off the table for me," he said. "I will fight."

He also said a "big intellectual difference" exists between his administration and the City Council.

"None of them have run anything, ever," Bing said, adding that council members have agreed to various proposals in the past but reversed themselves in public — basically lying to him. He didn't name names.

Council members have criticized Bing's cost savings plan as lacking boldness, and some have called for up to 2,300 layoffs —estimated to save $36.4 million by June 30.

Bing said those cuts would include 500 police and 400 firefighters, which would leave the city unprotected.

"Our city will implode," he said. "How do you run a city if you get rid of all the people?"

He used the word "implode" at least three times to warn of doom if more city employees, especially police and firefighters, are cut and if structural reforms to pensions, medical benefits and work rules aren't made with the unions.

Bing also said council members are opposing his plans because they're jockeying to become mayor themselves or seeking other jobs.

"I'm the mayor; they're not," Bing said, noting that he's willing to listen to any suggestions council members have on his plan — or plans of their own.

GUADALAJARA, Mexico -- The bound and gagged bodies of 26 men were found dumped before dawn Thursday in the heart of the picturesque city of Guadalajara, a sign that full-scale war between drug cartels may have come to the metropolis that hosted last month's Pan American Games.

Law-enforcement officials said the men were found, shot execution-style, in two vans and a pickup truck abandoned near the Milennium Arches, one of the most recognizable landmarks in Mexico's second-largest city.

Best known as the home of mariachi music and tequila, Guadalajara also sits on the main highway running through western Mexico from the methamphetamine-producing state of Michoacan north toward the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa. In recent months, security officials and analysts have worried that the city could become a target for the Zetas drug cartel, which has been using paramilitary-style tactics and headline-grabbing atrocities in a national push to grab territory from older organized crime groups.

"These acts of barbarism show how the war between cartels, and crime, is getting more brutal," Guadalajara's mayor, Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval, told reporters.

A message was found with the bodies in one of the vehicles, said Luis Carlos Najera, public security secretary for the state of Jalisco. He provided no details, but Mexican cartels frequently leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims as a way of sowing fear and taking credit for their actions.

"It's sad to see what's going on," taxi driver Jesus Amado said. "We used to be looking at the problem from afar. Now we're not, we've got it right here."

Officials initially reported that there were 23 bodies found. Ulises Enrique Camacho, a spokesman for the attorney-general's office, said Thursday afternoon that the toll had risen to 26.

The bodies were found about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the Expo Guadalajara events center, the site of both Pan Am Games events and the Guadalajara International Book Fair, which opens Saturday and describes itself as the world's most important Spanish-language book fair. The fair's website said it was expecting more than 600,000 visitors from around the world.

Crime in this colonial city of some 1.5 million people was historically dominated by the powerful Sinaloa cartel, but the group's tight grip was shattered by the death of its regional commander, Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel, in a shootout with federal police in July 2010.

Guadalajara's murder rate then soared as factions of the cartel known as the New Generation and the Resistance battled to control Coronel's territory and assets. Street battles have left hundreds dead in the city and surrounding areas.

Killing slowed to a trickle during the Oct. 15-30 Pan American Games, which brought a massive influx of police and soldiers. Law-enforcement officials and analysts said they were nonetheless concerned that a Zetas onslaught could be imminent.

Thursday's slaying bears the hallmarks of the Zetas, perhaps working in concert with the Resistance, said Samuel Logan, director of Southern Pulse, a risk-analysis firm specializing in Latin American organized crime.

If the Zetas turn out to be responsible, the Guadalajara attack may be part of a sustained offensive against Sinaloa, he said.

On Wednesday, 17 bodies were found burned in two pickup trucks in a strikingly similar attack in Sinaloa, the home state of the eponymous cartel. Twelve of the bodies were in the back of one truck, some of them handcuffed and wearing bulletproof vests.

"I think the location is significant, that points in the direction of the Zetas," Logan said, although he cautioned that another cartel may well turn out to be have been responsible. "Maybe the Zetas pushing into Guadalajara creates the next major battlefront ... If it was the Zetas, they're going to continue pushing."

Responding to a reporter's question, Najera told the Televisa television network that he believed the recent calm in Guadalajara was the result of an increase in security and not because drug cartels had struck a truce with each other during the games.

He declined to comment on the possible motives for the slayings, saying only that investigators had "various hypotheses."____Associated Press writers E. Eduardo Castillo and Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City contributed to this report.

About Me

I am a dissident journalist, whose work has been published in dozens of daily newspapers, magazines, and journals in English, German, and Swedish, under my own name and many pseudonyms. While living in internal exile in New York, where I am whitelisted, I maintain NSU/The Wyatt Earp Journalism Bureau and some eight other blogs (some are distinctive but occasional venues, while others are mirrors), and also write for stout-hearted men such as Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor. Please hit the “Donate” button on your way out. Thanks, in advance.
Follow my tweets at @NicholasStix.

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The response so far to WEJB/NSU’s ongoing fundraiser has been very heartening, but we need tens of thousands of dollars more, in order to tide us over for 2012! If you have given, I thank you. If not, please consider making a donation.